Friday, May 08, 2015

When you are transcribing and/or photographing a cemetery, it is important to know if there is a transcription available. In this case, there is a list of who is buried in the cemetery.

Sometimes, a child is buried with a family or with grandparents. The headstone can be small and only have initials, the word "baby" or the term infant son/daughter. So, seeing the list of children in this family buried with parents (the grandparents are nearby) is a huge bonus for the photographer. Mistakes can be made and stones can be unreadable. So, hopefully, someone put them in a compiled genealogy.

Traditionally, unnamed children were not listed by the compiler as there would be no descendants to follow down the line or who might want to join the family society. Thankfully today in our genealogy world that seems so wrong, as those babies and little children gone from this world are part of the story of their parents and grandparents. People grieved. Sometimes that grief caused irreparable damage to the adults in the form of depression and suicide.

Charles R. Hale and his cemetery crew were part of a WPA project during the depression for his home state of Connecticut. In this case, you can see that this cemetery was identified as the Gallup Cemetery #10 for Ledyard/Groton and this family is on page 36. You saw in the previous post that photographer Brian Zoldak noted where there were mistakes in the transcription.A transcription is supposed to contain the information that appears on the stone without correction or addition so that on that date, the transcribed stone must have been there and must have been easy to be read.

3 comments:

Hi Midge, You last sentence is really important! So glad you said it. Yes, often times that single transcription is our only existing record other than maybe what is in the original burial file of the particular cemetery. A lot of stones are broken, taken away or just are not readable any longer due to age.

Midge, Since my Great Granduncle William James Coffin died by his own hand in 1873 at "Worcester Hospital For The Insane", his parents were predisposed to give him a headstone. For one hundred an twenty-five years he was in the Coffin family lot here in New Bedford. I knew it because he was listed on the lot card. Finally, in 2001 I had a simple marked made for the poor fellow. I identify strongly (as only you can imagine) with this particular collateral ancestor.